Figure 6.
Anti-inflammatory activity of FCNG in primary human VSMCs. VSMCs were pre-treated with (11.7 ± 4.5) E + 9 particles/mL of FCNP and FCNG for 24 h, followed by stimulation with TNFα (20 ng/mL) for an additional 24 h, then analyzed for levels of IL-6 present in the cell culture media by ELISA (A) and levels of gene expression of IL-1β (B), IL-8 (C) and GRP (D) by qPCR. (E,F) Quantification of GRP present in VSMCs protein extracts (E) and in the cell culture media (F) by ELISA. Non-stimulated cells were used as controls for TNFα stimulation. (G) Viability of VSMCs exposed to (11.7 ± 4.5) × 109 particles/mL of FCNP or FCNG for 48 h. Data are representative of three independent experiments and presented as mean ± SD. Two-way ANOVA and multiple comparisons were performed with the Dunnett’s test, and are presented relative to the TNFα-stimulated cells. Statistical significance was defined as p ≤ 0.05 (*), p ≤ 0.01 (**), p ≤ 0.001 (***) and p ≤ 0.0001 (****).